ABSTRACT
Research in the life sciences from a holistic perspective demonstrates biological events are quite complex, and require understanding on the nanoscale level. Such an understanding of the biological systems will allow twenty-rst century scientists and engineers to harness the power enveloped within nature to address many societal problems: the need for sustainable fuels, chemicals and materials, the ability to detect and combat cancer and other diseases which threaten our ever-aging and increasingly urbanized population with new therapeuticals and new ways to deliver them, and to improve the environmental quality of our resources. Many biological events occur in the vicinity of interfaces, such as reactions and transport of metabolites across membranes, signaling between cells, and the unfolding and refolding of proteins. A deeper understanding of molecular events has inspired scientists in recent years to develop new approaches on the nanoscale level to preparing materials, microelectronics, and biomedical devices, to name a few (Karlsson et al. 2004). Therefore, the study of “biomimetics” is a worthwhile pursuit, where this term is dened as “. . . the attempt to learn from nature; it deals with development of innovations on the basis of investigation of natural, evolutionarily optimized biological structures, functions, processes, and systems” (von Gleich et al. 2010). A similar denition was provided in a review: “. . . a science which employs the principles of biochemical organization (i.e., the principles of structural organization, functioning, and regulation of biological systems at levels corresponding to biomacromolecules, supramolecular complexes, and subcellular structures) for the construction of articial systems with predetermined properties or for conferring desired properties on natural biochemical systems with the help of arti-cial elements” (Kurganov and Topchieva 1991).
